The Art Of Letters Part 13

He tries all sorts of false G.o.ds--nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation of the a.s.s, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zoophilpsychosis). But Rousseau already exhibits this 'psychosis.' He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his dog." As for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise pa.s.siveness"

instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle in pantheistic reveries. "In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination." Professor Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the mote of Arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land." He has no objection to a "return to nature," if it is for purposes of recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "a subst.i.tute for philosophy and religion." He denounces, indeed, every kind of "painless subst.i.tute for genuine spiritual effort." He admires the difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having.

On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other "Rousseauists" whom he attacks.

Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific complacency. "The nineteenth century," he declares, "may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries." He admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and literature. Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so than when he was working "with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law." Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, the author warns us that "the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature." He sees a peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our failure to discover that "something abiding" on which civilization must rest. He quotes Aristotle's anti-romantic saying that "most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." He feels that in conduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, "plumped for"

the disorderly manner to-day.

His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerous book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to Conservatism. After all, romanticism was a great liberating force. It liberated men, not from decorum, but from pseudo-decorum--not from humility, but from subserviency. It may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the true kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. I am afraid, however, that in getting rid of the vices of romanticism Professor Babbitt would pour away the baby with the bath water.

Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticism with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to cla.s.sicism with its emphasis on duties. Each of them tries to do without the other. The most notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize the necessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail to realize the necessity of tradition. On the other hand, the cla.s.sicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum of servants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals.

Professor Babbitt refers to the pseudo-cla.s.sical drama of seventeenth-century France, in which men confused n.o.bility of language with the language of the n.o.bility. He himself unfortunately is not free from similar prejudices. He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any movement for a better social system than we already possess. He is definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last two centuries. He has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he has failed to appreciate their virtues. Literature to-day is less n.o.ble than the literature of Shakespeare, partly, I think, because men have lost the "sense of sin." Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest tragedy. The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and the impure, the n.o.ble and the base, as no writer perceives it to-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. On the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In the great books of the world, in _Isaiah_ and the Gospels, the best elements of both the cla.s.sic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. If Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of "Consider the lilies of the field"?

XX.--GEORGIANS

(1) MR. DE LA MARE

Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcely more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes!

Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous with birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs than these.

Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for the labouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily procession only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick for love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the common world. Like the lover in _The Tryst_, he dreams always of a secret place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and s.p.a.ce we know:

Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come, There, out of all remembrance, make our home: Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair, Hollowed by Noah's mouse beneath the chair Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound, Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.

Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea Would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me, There of your beauty we would joyance make-- A music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake: Haply Elijah, o'er his spokes of fire, Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre, Spied, tranced in azure of inanest s.p.a.ce, Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace, Where two might happy be--just you and I-- Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.

This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to the bitterness of reality:

No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep.

Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.

These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _Motley_.

The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death.

Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare's book is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders:

Flit would the ages On soundless wings Ere unto Z My pen drew nigh; Leviathan told, And the honey-fly.

He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light," in a bush without realizing that--

All the throbbing world Of dew and sun and air By this small parcel of life Is made more fair.

He bids us in _Farewell_:

Look thy last on all things lovely Every hour. Let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.

Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare's melancholy. His sorrow is idealist's sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover.

We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of n.o.ble sacrifices made for the world.

Now each man's mind all Europe is,

he cries, in the first line in _Happy England_, and, as he remembers the peace of England, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness," he exclaims:

O what a deep contented night The sun from out her Eastern seas Would bring the dust which in her sight Had given its all for these!

So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare's, however, could not remain content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men.

In the long poem called _Motley_ he turns from the heroism to the madness of war, translating his vision into a fool's song:

Nay, but a dream I had Of a world all mad, Not simply happy mad like me, Who am mad like an empty scene Of water and willow-tree, Where the wind hath been; But that foul Satan-mad, Who rots in his own head....

The fool's vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of the Holy Ghost n.o.bly falling in the lists with their country looking on, but of men's bodies--

Dragging cold cannon through a mire Of rain and blood and spouting fire, The new moon glinting hard on eyes Wide with insanities!

In _The Marionettes_ Mr. de la Mare turns to tragic satire for relief from the bitterness of a war-maddened world:

Let the foul scene proceed: There's laughter in the wings; 'Tis sawdust that they bleed, But a box Death brings.

How rare a skill is theirs These extreme pangs to show, How real a frenzy wears Each feigner of woe!

And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish:

Strange, such a Piece is free, While we spectators sit, Aghast at its agony, Yet absorbed in it!

Dark is the outer air, Coldly the night draughts blow, Mutely we stare, and stare, At the frenzied Show.

Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud Of deep, immutable blue-- We cry, "The end!" We are bowed By the dread, "'Tis true!"

While the Shape who hoofs applause Behind our deafened ear, Hoots--angel-wise--"the Cause"!

And affrights even fear.

There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas Hardy's black-edged indictment of life.

As we read Mr. de la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of the work of many other poets--of the ballad-writers, the Elizabethan song-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and Mr. W.B. Yeats. In some instances it is as though Mr. de la Mare had deliberately set himself to compose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters.

Thus, _April Moon_, which contains the charming verse--

"The little moon that April brings, More lovely shade than light, That, setting, silvers lonely hills Upon the verge of night"--

is merely Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" turned into new music. New music, we should say, is Mr. de la Mare's chief gift to literature--a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a music in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a strange beauty, as in _Alexander_, which begins:

It was the Great Alexander, Capped with a golden helm, Sate in the ages, in his floating ship, In a dead calm.

One finds Mr. de la Mare's characteristic, unemphatic music again in the opening lines of _Mrs. Grundy_:

Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot, Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,

where "foot" and "not" are rhymes.